Turning Over: Why page turners matter
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Turning Over: Why page turners matter
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Re: Turning Over: Why page turners matter
#2What a wonderful treatment of a particularly stressful job.
I'm a classically trained musician, but have little experience playing piano, yet I've been recruited to turn pages not infrequently. Somehow there seems to be more pressure as a page-turner than as a performer. I always felt extremely conscious of my place beside the musician, while as a performer, it is much easier to lose ones self in the muscle-memory and flow of a piece. Page-turning requires, as the essay describes, a special kind of focus.
Re: Turning Over: Why page turners matter
#3This article is - dare I say it? a page-turner!
Seriously, I never thought an article about such an esoteric topic would be so interesting.
Re: Turning Over: Why page turners matter
#4This article is - dare I say it? a page-turner! Seriously, I never thought an article about such an esoteric topic would be so interesting.
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Re: Turning Over: Why page turners matter
#5What a wonderful treatment of a particularly stressful job. I'm a classically trained musician, but have little experience playing piano, yet I've been recruited to turn pages not infrequently. Somehow there seems to be more pressure as a page-turner than as a performer. I always felt extremely conscious of my place beside the musician, while as a performer, it is much easier to lose ones self in the muscle-memory an…
I have been recruited as a page-turner more than I've needed a page-turner (usually played from memory). I think being the page-turner is more stressful because you can screw up the performance just as badly, but resulting from a much smaller level of negligence. That makes it seem so much worse if it happens.
Re: Turning Over: Why page turners matter
#6Genuinly curious: why is this still a thing? How difficult could it be to throw together some screen, microphone and ML algorithm that would turn the pages (or roll then up) at appropriate time?
Re: Turning Over: Why page turners matter
#7seems that the real source of the stress is that you're screwing up something that isn't really yours to screw up.
Re: Turning Over: Why page turners matter
#8Genuinly curious: why is this still a thing? How difficult could it be to throw together some screen, microphone and ML algorithm that would turn the pages (or roll then up) at appropriate time?
Why do you think that a software solution to this requires ML?
Re: Turning Over: Why page turners matter
#9Genuinly curious: why is this still a thing? How difficult could it be to throw together some screen, microphone and ML algorithm that would turn the pages (or roll then up) at appropriate time?
Aside from the technical challenges of this, I think that it's not exactly in the spirit of classical performance, which often is as much about the incredible skill and attention-to-detail of the people on stage as it is about the sound of the music itself. So, I imagine many skilled pianists would still prefer a human page turner over such a device, even if it did exist and functioned perfectly.
Re: Turning Over: Why page turners matter
#10Genuinly curious: why is this still a thing? How difficult could it be to throw together some screen, microphone and ML algorithm that would turn the pages (or roll then up) at appropriate time?
It's happening, albeit gradually. I play music, and a growing number of musicians are showing up with what looks like an overgrown LCD tablet, and a little pedal that they step on to advance the page. One of my band-mates takes every new chart, photographs it with his cell phone, and puts the chart back into the band's files.
Some pitfalls: The screens have to be big, with no glare. Each musician needs access to a scanner that can handle oversize pages. There needs to be a format that lets the musicians make edits and annotations on the fly.
The tech has to work perfectly. How many of us have been to meetings where something went wrong with the projector, or with PowerPoint?
To either earn a living or even be reasonably busy as an amateur, musicians have to handle a lot of last-minute work with multiple groups that all have varying levels of tech savvy. The bandleader just has to be in possession of the physical sheets, to be absolutely assured that they will work.